This Week's New Video Game: 'The Da Vinci Code'

Updated 10:00 pm, Monday, May 22, 2006

If you thought the wildly successful novel "The Da Vinci Code" made for a lackluster film, you should try it as a video game.

What a snooze.

What a bore.

What an utterly thrill-less thriller.

The game version of "The Da Vinci Code" reveals itself to be part action-adventure title, part puzzler, part stealth game as it takes you through pretty much the same story as the movie and book (with a few additional tidbits).

The player controls cryptologist Sophie Neveu and scholar Robert Langdon as they try to solve the murder of Neveu's grandfather and unravel Christianity's biggest secret. Unfortunately, much like the movie, the game's pace gets bogged down by the lengthy lectures the characters give to help us understand the historical intrigue at work here.

Meanwhile the player must run the characters about, searching for clues and trying to solve various puzzles, little of which is particularly fun to do.

Worst of all, the combat system is clunky and confusing to use. Though the game is based primarily on the movie version of "The Da Vinci Code," Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou did not lend their likenesses or voices to the game. It's easy to see why.